The commercial cargo vessel will bring home a variety of critical space research, including ISS hardware to extracted for analysis, refurbishment or discarding, NASA said.

After spending over a month in the orbit, SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft left the International Space Station (ISS) on Sunday and is expected to land on Earth on Monday night, NASA said. "The SpaceX Dragon cargo craft was released from the ISS today at 6.33 p.m.," NASA said in a statement on Sunday.

"Dragon will parachute to a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean Monday at 12:15 a.m. then will be towed to port in southern California by a SpaceX personnel," it added.